Eco-Tec's Ecoparque El Zamorano, Honduras.Constructed with 8,000 bottles with composting toilets and a solar water heating system. It's the first house in the world made from PET bottles without using cement in the walls.

I don't like it, I LOVE it!

Eco Tec's Sky Field House: The first vaulted ceiling using PET bottles.

Most of the PET bottles used are recovered in clean-up campaigns and recycling drives. The community then fills them with sand. They train the unemployed and disabled in their construction methods. They build water tanks, schools, community centers, urban benches as well as homes.

An Eco-Tec home in Bolivia.

This home in Bolivia incorporates lots of wine bottles as well as PET bottles. I am totally down with drinking more wine and building a house out of the evidence.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Jabuticaba (also called the Brazilian Grape Tree) grows off the trunk of the tree, can be plucked and eaten straight off of it.

Jabuticaba has evolved so that animals that cannot climb very high can reach it, eat it and then expel the seeds away from the parent tree to further propagate the species.

Common in Brazilian markets, jaboticabas are largely eaten fresh; their popularity has been likened to that of grapes in the US. Fresh fruit may begin to ferment 3 to 4 days after harvest, so they are often used to make jams, tarts, strong wines, and liqueurs

Monday, May 9, 2011

1. Scientists have counted over 500 different liver functions. You may not think much about your liver except after a long night of drinking, but the liver is one of the body’s hardest working, largest and busiest organs. Some of the functions your liver performs are: production of bile, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein synthesis, and detoxification.

2. Women are born better smellers than men and remain better smellers over life. Studies have shown that women are more able to correctly pinpoint just what a smell is. Women were better able to identify citrus, vanilla, cinnamon and coffee smells. While women are overall better smellers, there is an unfortunate 2% of the population with no sense of smell at all.

3.Humans can make do longer without food than sleep. While you might feel better prepared to stay up all night partying than to give up eating, that feeling will be relatively short lived. Provided there is water, the average human could survive a month to two months without food depending on their body fat and other factors. Sleep deprived people, however, start experiencing radical personality and psychological changes after only a few sleepless days. The longest recorded time anyone has ever gone without sleep is 11 days, at the end of which the experimenter was awake, but stumbled over words, hallucinated and frequently forgot what he was doing.

4. A simple, moderately severe sunburn damages the blood vessels extensively. How extensively? Studies have shown that it can take four to fifteen months for them to return to their normal condition. Consider that the next time you’re feeling too lazy to apply sunscreen before heading outside.

5. Over 90% of diseases are caused or complicated by stress. That high stress job you have could be doing more than just wearing you down each day. It could also be increasing your chances of having a variety of serious medical conditions like depression, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Sticks and saplings are a common material that everyone knows and has personal associations with. They are the material of childhood play, indigenous tribes and gardeners. Give a child a stick and you see that immediately it is a weapon, a tool or a magic wand. For me sticks are lines with which to draw. I use many of the drawing conventions that someone using a paper and pencil might employ. Also, I have learned to amass the smaller ends of sticks in one direction which gives the impression that the surface is moving. As long as I continue to make discoveries about how to employ saplings in interesting ways, I am hooked on them as a way to build sculptures that I dream about.
~ Patrick Dougherty